I use pretty much all platforms and architectures as my "daily drivers" - x64, Apple Silicon, and ARM Cortex, with various mixtures of Linux/Mac/Windows.

When Apple released Apple Silicon, it was a huge breath of fresh air - suddenly the web became snappy again! And the battery lasted forever! Software has bloated to slow down MacBooks again, RAM can often be a major limiting factor in performance, and battery life is more variable now.

Intel is finally catching up to Apple for the first time since 2020. Panther Lake is very competitive on everything except single-core performance (including battery life). Panther Lake CPU's arguably have better features as well - Intel QSV is great if you compile ffmpeg to use it for encoding, and it's easier to use local AI models with OpenVINO than it is to figure out how to use the Apple NPU's. Intel has better tools for sampling/tracing performance analysis, and you can actually see you're loading the iGPU (which is quite performant) and how much VRAM you're using. Last I looked, there was still no way to actually check if an AI model was running on Apple's CPU, GPU, or NPU. The iGPU's can also be configured to use varying amounts of system RAM - I'm not sure how that compares to Apple's unified memory for effective VRAM, and Apple has higher memory bandwidth/lower latency.

I'm not saying that Intel has matched Apple, but it's competitive in the latest generation.

Apple silicon is very fast per size/watt. The mind blowing thing is the macbook air that has weighs very little, doesn't have a fan, and feels competitive with top of the line desktop pcs.

First of all, Apple CPUs are not the fastest. In fact top 20 fastest CPUs right now is probably an AMD and Intel only affair.

Apples CPUs are most powerful efficient however, due to a bunch of design and manufacturing choices.

But to answer your question, yes Windows 11 with modern security crap feels 2-3 slower than vanilla Linux on the same hardware.

I think you're bringing up a great question here. If you ask a random person on the street "is your laptop fast", the answer probably has more to do with what software that person is running, than what hardware.

My Apple silicon laptop feels super fast because I just open the lid and it's running. That's not because the CPU ran instructions super fast, it's because I can just close the lid and the battery lasts forever.

New Mac arm user here.

Replaced a good Windows machine (Ryzen 5? 32 Gb) and I have a late intel Mac and a Linux workstation (6 core Ryzen 5, 32 Gb).

Obviously the Mac is newer. But wow. It's faster even on things that CPU shouldn't matter, like going through a remote samba mount through our corporate VPN.

- Much faster than my intel Mac

- Faster than my Windows

- Haven't noticed any improvements over my Linux machines, but with my current job I no longer get to use them much for desktop (unfortunately).

Of course, while I love my Debian setup, boot up is long on my workstation; screensaver/sleep/wake up is a nightmare on my entertainment box (my fault, but common!). The Mac just sleeps/wakes up with no problems.

The Mac (smallest air) is also by far the best laptop Ive ever had from a mobility POV. Immediate start up, long battery, decent enough keyboard (but If rather sacrifice for a longer keypress)

I've used Linux as a daily driver for 6 months and I am now back to my M1 Max for the past month.

I didn't find any reply mentioning the easy of use, benefits and handy things the mac does and Linux won't. Spotlight, Photos app with all the face recognition and general image index, contact sync, etc. Takes ages to setup those on Linux and with macs everything just works with an Apple account. So I wonder if Linux had to do all this background stuff, if it would be able to run smoothly as Macs run this days.

For context: I was running Linux for 6 months for the first time in 10 years (which I was daily driving macs). My M1 Max still beats my full tower gaming PC, which I was using linux at. I've used Windows and Linux before, and Windows for gaming too. My Linux setup was very snappy without any corporate stuff. But my office was getting warm because of the PC. My M1 barely turn on the fans, even with large DB migrations and other heavy operation during software development.

Somehow my 2011 MacBook Pro was the fastest laptop I had ever used.

After I put an SSD in it, that is.

I wonder what my Apple silicon laptop is even doing sometimes.

For me it’s things like boot speed. How long does it take to restart the computer. To log out, and log back in with all my apps opening.

Mac on intel feels like it was about 2x slower at these basic functions. (I don’t have real data points)

Intel Mac had lag when opening apps. Silicon Mac is instant and always responsive.

No idea how that compares to Linux.

You can notice that memory bandwidth advantage even in workloads like photo editing and code compilation. That and the performance cores reserved for foreground compute, on top of the usual "Linux sucks at swap" (was it fixed? I haven't enabled swap on my Linux machines for ages by now), does make a day-to-day difference in my usage.

I love apple and mainly use one for personal use, but apple users consistently overrate how fast their machines are. I used to see sentiment like "how will nvidia ever catch up with apples unified silicon approach" a few years ago. But if you just try nvidia vs apple and compare on a per dollar level, nvidia is so obviously the winner.

Power management with Mac’s is the big benefit, imo.

It’s all about the perf per watt.

I haven’t used a laptop other than a mac in 10 years. I remember being extremely frustrated with the Intel macs. What I hated most was getting into video meetings, which would make the Intel CPU sound like a 747 taxiing.

The switch from a top spec, new Intel Mac to a base model M1 Macbook Air was like a breath of fresh air. I still use that 5 year old laptop happily because it was such a leap forward in performance. I dont recall ever being happy with a 5 year old device.

I think you should spend some time looking at actual laptop review coverage before asking questions like this.

There are dozens of outlets out there that run synthetic and real world benchmarks that answer these questions.

Apple’s chips are very strong on creative tasks like video transcoding, they have the best single core performance as well as strong multi-core performance. They also have top tier power efficiency, battery life, and quiet operation, which is a lot of what people look for when doing corporate tasks.

Depending on the chip model, the graphics performance is impressive for the power draw, but you can get better integrated graphics from Intel Panther Lake, and you can get better dedicated class graphics from Nvidia.

Some outlets like Just Josh tech on YouTube are good at demonstrating these differences.